


Returns

by lettersandsodas



Category: Fingersmith - Sarah Waters
Genre: F/F, Porn Battle
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-03-25
Updated: 2011-03-25
Packaged: 2017-10-17 07:02:53
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,946
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/174162
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lettersandsodas/pseuds/lettersandsodas
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A scene immediately after Maud and Sue's reunion at the end of the novel/movie.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Returns

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for the Femslash_Today [porn battle](http://community.livejournal.com/femslash_today/381428.html), prompt "Fingersmith, Maud/Sue, discoveries." It is based more on the book than the movie version of _Fingersmith_ , but it should be easy enough to follow if you've only seen the movie. The only important differences are A) Maud and Sue love each other by the end of the book, but do not admit it to each other as they do in the movie, and B) book!Maud is not unsympathetic, but the movie leaves out some of the darker elements of her personality. Also, this follows the style of the book in the sense that it's first-person narration, with Sue speaking in the past tense and Maud in the present.

She sat and showed me the meanings of the words, one by one, but I don't believe I heard a single one of them—not really.

It always struck me, things like that. Once, at night, a boy from outside the Borough had come to Lant Street looking for our house. He had a lode of poke and a pair of watchmen following closely enough that they'd managed to catch him when he lost the path, as strangers often did in the darkness. (I suppose, as a point of digression, that it wouldn't have mattered if he'd found it, as none of us would ever have been fool enough to open the door to him.) It was raining that night, and I was sitting in the attic watching the water streak the windowpanes and listening to it beat at the roof. I saw all of it happen. The watchmen were a brute sort and pummeled him senseless with their clubs before he could make so much as a move at dragging himself out of the mud they'd knocked him into. I watched and made no sound. Yet what I remembered about that night was the way the raindrops had run down the window, and the way the house had groaned under the water, as London houses do.

It was odd, I'd decided later, the things one noticed in certain moments.

Now it was the the clearness of Maud's voice, its evenness as she read things that would have brought color to the cheeks of the lowest whore in London, that I noted. Her tone was not flat as it had been before. She was not daring me to turn away from her, or attempting to provoke my scorn by revealing to me what it was she thought herself. She was trying to provoke me in another way entirely. But the instincts that I could only imagine had been trained into her over a period of years—and I shuddered again to think of that—were not easily broken. I watched the way her lips formed deliberately and carefully around the words. I took note of the way her tongue, now as black at its tip as her—as _my_ —uncle's had been, touched so precisely against her teeth as she enunciated. She read as though she were reciting, as though this were an academic exercise and she, my tutor.

Perhaps she was. I had never had a sweetheart before her, though it seemed perverse to call her that after everything that had transpired between us. Before this very day, I had never even known that what we had done in her bed—those things that still caused shivers to echo in me when I thought on them—had an existence outside of us and the darkness. But now I realized that they did. She had known them. My mind wandered to suspicions that there might exist some secret sphere all around me, of which I had somehow managed to remain ignorant for the whole of my life thus far.

Quite suddenly, I found I was interrupting her. 'Are there many women who do these things?'

She blinked as though she had been snapped out of a daze. 'I can't say that I know,” she answered finally. 'I know only that there are many men who relish the idea that they do, and so such things are written. And so I am able to sell them.'

There seemed to me something strange and horrid in that, but I kept silent. For no reason at all, I thought of Gentleman touching her, pressing his lips to her palm as he had by the river. It galled me even now to think of him using her so, stinging the softness of her hands with his whiskers.

 _You pearl_. I had thought her a pearl before, pure and soft and delicate, She was not that, though. She had never been that.

'Do you write them for them, then, these men?' I don't know why I asked it. I knew the answer well enough. Perhaps I wanted to hear her tell me it again.

'No,' she told me. 'I write them only with the expectation that that they will read them.'

She said nothing more, only held my gaze steadily, as if she expected or perhaps hoped that I would press her further. But I could only observe her. Everything, I thought, was changed. Her brow still bore the smear of blackness which I had failed to wipe away earlier. I had dismissed it then as only ink, but it seemed in the moment to be a sign of a something much greater. She was not pure and innocent and good, but smudged. I supposed that, had I been raised a lady, I should think that she had been smeared and marked—blackened—by the nature of her laborings. Ladies loved those sorts of metaphors. But, me, I never held it against a girl who did what she had to for money or a bit of pleasure. And seeing Maud sitting there, looking at me as she did with with a mix of pride and hopefulness, her hands bared and her face marked with her passions—I thought only that she looked beautiful.

Something in my gaze must have betrayed me, for I heard the way her breath caught. Her eyes, which grew darker than ever I remembered them being, flitted to my lips, and mine to hers. I thought at once of the pull of that first night, the way the pressing of our mouths drew shapes out of the darkness and made it so that I scarcely knew what I was about. I had reached between us then and moved upon her. She had not touched me, and I wondered if she would now. I pictured her black-tipped tongue moving over my skin, leaving trails of diluted India ink in its wake, and something low in my belly dropped.

Quite suddenly, however, I became conscious of my own sweat, of the grit and exhaust I felt certain still clung to me from my travels earlier in the day. Earlier in the day—what a strange thought it was, for it seemed like another lifetime ago that I pushed my way through the gates of Briar hoping to find some means by which to begin my search for her. I had not expected our reunion, nor any of the revelations that had accompanied it.

I told her, 'I think perhaps I would like to bathe...' I did not say 'first' but I was confident she heard it anyway.

'Yes, of course,' she said, though she again looked like she had been broken out of a spell. 'Though I am afraid that you will have to run the water yourself.'

She said it as though she had not considered that I had been doing so nearly my whole life. I wondered briefly if William Inker's wife still did it for her.

'It's no matter,' I told her. 'I'll be quick about it.'

And I was. My head still spun with the events of the day, but I supposed, as I ran the cloth automatically over my face, under my arms, that it hardly mattered. I had found her. I washed between my legs and discovered that I was already quite wet, though there had been nothing but memory and anticipation to provoke it.

The water was cold and there was no fire in the servant's quarters because, of course, there were no servants to make use of one. And so I shivered as I slid into my night clothes and began to wind my way back to the library—back to her—through the gloomy and drafty corridors of Briar. I remembered, as I made my way in the near-darkness, why I had hated this place, and I marveled that I should have come back to it of my own accord.

But I recalled the circumstances of our births, the strange ways our fortunes had so long been intertwined without us knowing it. I thought, then, that perhaps it was a matter of fate that I always returned to her.

***

I wait for her. I suppose I have been waiting for her a great while before this, though I did not know it. I had not dared to hope that she would find me, nor even that she might seek me for any other reason that to end my wretched existence at her hand. I had expected she must hate me. Why should she not? I do, and I have done far worse by her.

But she does not hate me. She loves me. She said it earlier with her hesitation, as clearly as if she had said by her words. I hear her footsteps in the hallway, still heavy in the way that had provoked my— _her_ —uncle's scorn more than once, and then I see her at the door. Her eyes meet mine, hesitant. They say it again.

I can see that she is cold. She holds her arms tight to her body and draws her shoulders up. 'Come sit by the fire,' I tell her. 'Warm yourself.'

It is something of a ruse, of course, in the way that it was a ruse when I had asked her what a woman must do on her wedding night. But it is different this time. Before, I was knowing and she was not. She knows everything now, and returns to me nonetheless. Were I the kind for sentiment, I should think I would feel touched. Instead, the thought arouses something else entirely in me.

She joins me on the floor, and rubs her hands clumsily and unselfconsciously together as she extends them towards the fire. There is no reason, I think, that I should find such an appeal in her artlessness, but I do. I want to take one of those hands, and put it to my mouth. I want to taste her fingers. I want to moisten them and then move them lower, between my legs, as I had done on that wretched night in the cabin.

But I do not. I have never touched her. I used to think of doing so often as I watched her going about her tasks as my maid, or as I read my uncle's books. I think about it often still when I sit to inscribe debaucheries on paper. The number of times I have considered what I would do if she were to surrender herself to me is, in fact, beyond count.

And now she has. I decide I will waste no time in making my fancies manifest.

Her lips yield to mine when I lean into her, and I sigh quite unintentionally. She brings her hand up at the sound and cups my cheek, presses her mouth harder to mine. It pleases me. The first time we were together, she put her lips to my chest and nipped and sucked at the flesh there until it bruised under her affections. The hint of her teeth against my lips now makes me hopeful that love has not blunted the instinct for roughness in her. I should think it a loss if it had.

Her kisses inflame me. Quite like a flame, she sucks the very air away from my lungs until my head grows light. I have to pull myself back from her so that I might catch my breath, but I find I cannot cease my attentions for long. I press my lips to her neck, to the place where the bone juts from her shoulder. The nightgown she wears gaps there, for she has not bothered to tie the strings tightly. My hands make short work of them and then I am kissing her there as well, pressing my mouth to the area above her breast. I think perhaps I will return the mark she gave me, by roughness or by the India ink that I imagine still clings to my tongue. And so I kiss her skin until she cries out, just softly. Her hand finds her way into my hair and pulls me up to her, and this time she is even less gentle in the way she moves against me.

As before, I relish it, but I am unwilling to brook the distraction for long. Not now—not when there is so much I wish to do. I wish foremost to strip her out of her nightdress. I wish to gaze upon her nakedness in the way that I had not been able when I was her mistress and she, my servant. But the fire is low and the room is drafty now that I have chipped the layers of paint from the windows, and so I settle for merely pushing at the material until her thighs are bared to the explorations of my hands.

Her cheeks color pleasantly, and her breath quickens when my fingers find the spot between her legs—her cunt, though the word seems too vulgar to be applied to Sue. She is not a woman in a book. She is not voluptuous and soft, but small and compact, with hands rough from years of laboring. She does not have tawny, trim hair there. She is dark in ways a lady should be light. I want her all the more for it.

 _'I want—I want.'_ That is what she had said just before she'd pressed her fingers inside of me. Now, I want as well. I slide my fingers against her—and breathe too sharply when I feel how wet she has grown from our exertions—until they find what I seek. I press forward then, but I am surprised. Her flesh does not give automatically, and I hesitate, just as she had hesitated. She had been unknowing in our encounter, but I had assumed her knowing in the more general way. For a moment, I am unsure of what to do, though, of course, the mechanics themselves are not unfamiliar to me.

'It's all right,' she says, and touches my cheek again. 'Do it.'

I feel an unwelcome tightness in my chest, but she does not allow me to dwell on it. She pushes her hips into my hand, and I meet her. There is a moment in which she cries out, and I relish it, I think, more than I should. But then I put my lips to hers to soothe her, and still my fingers until her hips rise up to mine again.

I move slowly then, putting my hips behind my hand as she had done. She is so warm, so close around me, and I marvel at how something so expected could be at the same time so strange and thrilling. I think that I should like to do this forever, to hold her under me always, sighing and straining against my fingers.

But I cannot maintain it. I am a common girl by birth, but not by strength, and, anyway, it is not enough to satisfy me—not completely. I think of the work I had been so loath to read before Richard and my uncle's friends: _'And she pressed her lips and tongue to it, and into it..." ___

I lean down to place a kiss on her belly, and then I move lower. I am prone to nerves, but I am not nervous now, only eager and curious. I urge the parting of her thighs. I kiss her. Her hips jump so suddenly that I can barely move away quickly enough.

'Miss!' she cries, and then immediately corrects herself. 'Maud. What...'

The look of shock she wears brings me rather sudden amusement. 'Shh.' I tell her, teasing. 'Did I not teach you that you must speak softly while we are in this room?' I lean down again to run my tongue along her length, and she gasps just as loudly but does not move away.

It is different from what I expect. The taste is not sweet, but something else entirely, something for which I have no quick comparison. The motion of it is not simple, either. The joint of my thumb bumps my chin when I thrust, and so I still my hand and settle for curling my fingers inside her. Still, I feel drawn into her, tight and cramped. I feel trapped by her smell, her taste, the weight of her thighs upon my shoulders.

For once, however, I find I enjoy the feeling of confinement. I am surrounded by her, by her sounds, by her moans, by her fingers pulling my hair taut at the scalp. It brings me into a sort of frenzy, and I grow clumsy in my movements. My mouth slides against her without art, without skill. I want only to devour her.

And I suppose it sufficient, for she shivers suddenly with my name on her lips and clutches at my fingers. I feel my chin grow wetter with her satisfaction, and pride soars within me even as I feel an echoing throb in my own belly.

But it is still not enough. I think it will never be enough. I was trained to be a cataloger of filths, but now I think I shall put my skills to use as a cataloger of her pleasures. I will learn her body, I decide, as I learned language, as I learned fonts and scripts and bindings. I will become an expert at it. For I have the patience of a scholar and nothing but time at Briar, and she has returned to me.

  


Feedback is, as always, appreciated.

**Author's Note:**

> Note: Some of the phrasings and bits of figurative language employed here are Waters's (e.g. "Everything, I tell myself, is changed" and Sue's recollection of their first kiss having drawn things out of the darkness). In the book, Maud and Sue's respective narrations include some of the same phrases and imagery, to a really stunning effect. The interplay and the doubling-back on certain phrases is so crucial that I didn't want to leave it out here, but the line between playing in the sandbox and plagiarizing seems to me not so clear in lit fandom. I hope I haven't crossed it.


End file.
